Evaluation of Cu/Graphene Integration Schemes for Its Application on CMOS BEOL Interconnect

Abstract

With CMOS technology feature size continually scaling down, EM reliability issue of Cu interconnect is becoming more and more severe. As a 2D material, Graphene can sustain much higher current density, which may have potential application value to CMOS BEOL interconnect. And introduction of Graphene as capping layer on Cu metal line will be a much more effective way to improve the Cu interconnect EM performance. In this work, different Cu/Graphene integration schemes were implemented and evaluated based on 200mm Cu BEOL, including transfer based scheme and self-aligned scheme, and advantages and drawbacks of these schemes were analyzed. Further work is still ongoing for optimizing the integration scheme and realizing process integration of the Cu/Graphene interconnect on 200mm Cu BEOL.